Freedom Index

We all cherish freedom; it is a major factor among those that define happiness. Otherwise why would we take freedom away from a criminal as a way of punishing him? Why would citizens living under an oppressive government rebel?

However, one does not have to be a criminal or live in an oppressive country to experience the challenges of not being free, or the joy of freedom. We all have restrictions on what we are or not able to do at any stage of life.

If you take a simplistic viewpoint, there are five factors that define personal freedom: Financial ability, physical ability, available free time, dependency on others, and others dependent on you. These factors change over lifetime.  

Unless you are born in a rich family, the financial ability rises over time, reaching the peak as you retire. If you have planned your finances carefully, the financial ability continues through retirement.

The physical ability starts out being low, reaches a peak in your twenties and then goes through a slow decline the rest of your life (depressing). The availability of free time starts out high but then starts declining, reaching a bottom when you hit middle age. It rises again as you retire, staying high for the rest of your life.

Dependency on others also curtails freedom. It begins low (low=dependent) as you start your life, and are dependent on your parents. It also ends on a low note toward the later years as you become dependent on others, most likely your children. Finally, if you are taking care of others, whether it is your children or your parents, there is some curtailment of your freedom. That comes in two phases, one initially, when you are taking care of your children, the other when you hit your middle age and are taking care of parents.

We can combine all these factors and create a “Freedom Index” that indicate how free we are at different stages of life. I have done that by assigning values zero to ten for the first three factors (financial ability, physical ability, and availability of free time), and from minus ten to zero for the last two (dependency on others and others dependent on you). Then I calculated “Freedom Index” by simply adding my estimated scores for all the factors. Here are the results.

The Freedom Index thus calculated indicates that the best time of your life from the perspective of freedom to do things is the 60s to early 70s when you have the financial ability, physical ability, plenty of free time and the absence of dependency, in both directions. These are the golden years. There are other times, such as your early twenties, late forties, or the last few years of your life when there is some freedom but because of one factor or another, not as much as during the golden years.

This analysis gets really interesting if you consider that people live longer than the mid eighties as I have assumed in the above analysis. Let us see what happens if people live to mid-nighties, as is becoming more common these days.

As can be seen, the extra decade thus lived is not necessarily the one with most freedom. In fact, those years are likely to be spent in being dependent on others. In addition, your financial ability may also take a hit in that extra decade because you did not plan to live that long.

Most importantly, the arrival of extra long life creates a hit on your golden years because you end up taking care of your parents for extra ten years and that period squarely coincides with time you are supposed to be enjoying life to the fullest.  The period of maximum freedom, in that case reduces from fifteen years (as was the case when people lived to mid-eighties) to five. So, while we celebrate the fact that we all live longer, we need to be aware that the quality of life gets sacrificed for quantity. 

One needs to keep in mind that the above analysis is for freedom and not necessarily for happiness.

All of the factors in the above analysis, with the exception of physical ability, have an ambiguous relationship with happiness. Money does help, but not determine, how happy you are. So, it is with available time. For some, that is a curse rather then blessing. Although they have time to do what they want, having too much of it can bring unhappiness. Dependency on others brings lack of freedom but also love and caring. The same is true, in reverse, when you are taking care of someone. The lack of freedom is compensated by deep satisfaction that comes with nurturing and having done ones duty.